Atlus’ 2019 Sci-Fi Thriller Was Evangelion Meets Christopher Nolan

This article contains spoilers for many of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim’s plot.Here’s a thing about me. While I appreciate Barbie’s candy-colored social commentary, I can’t deny that I’m an Oppenheimer guy at the end of the day. Black-and-white scenes symbolizing historical events, and color scenes representing subjective perspectives; the plot is as haphazard and incomprehensible as you would expect from Nolan, but I would argue that 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is no less bonkers in these departments.

Developed by Vanillaware in 2019 and later published by Atlus and Sega for PS4 and Nintendo Switch, 13 Sentinels is part real-time strategy and part interactive visual novel. The game mashes together the stories of 13 playable protagonists into one captivating heap of everything good about the sci-fi genre. E.T, War of the Worlds, Alien, Terminator, and many more influences and tropes from Japanese works like Evangelion and Megazone are skillfully woven between the different storylines, with the characters seemingly living within these movies to a fault.

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Nenji Ogata is trapped in a timeloop he can’t escape from. Natsuno Minami is transported into a post-apocalyptic future. Keitaro Mirua is fighting in the past. Ei Sekigahara is traveling between dimensions. That’s just the tip of the deep iceberg of how the stakes change drastically from one character to another. And it’s even more bizarre on a vertical basis, because you can never pinpoint the exact timeline of the events. Some characters are portrayed as normal school students in one episode, yet in another episode, they are fixing some station in outer space in the year 2188.

No matter how much you try to anticipate what’s coming next or get a grasp on the full situation, in the next five minutes a new twist will emerge and throw off your entire thought process. 13 Sentinels would just introduce a character and then tell you the robot in another timeline is the same character, and would also tell you that following a talking cat is essential to figuring out the answers.

The game never holds your hand. It’s a humbling yet stimulating style of storytelling that parallels some of Nolan’s biggest strengths in filmmaking—the ability to personalize the experience depending on the viewer’s level of understanding or attention.

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Inception, for instance, is understood differently depending on how much attention you paid to the dream-sharing concepts, their consequential effects, and the role of the protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb, in the story. If you miss the concept of time moving slower in each dream within a dream–which is only explained in very few scenes–Inception would be an incomprehensible mess. 13 Sentinels takes this to the next level by shaping its story like a prism that shines differently depending on how you hold it or which character from the ensemble cast you choose, and the game’s unfolding logic varies depending on the amount of information you have at any moment.

I was personally drawn to Megumi Yakushiji’s sadness over her beloved Kurabe Juro forgetting about her. Naturally, I started to follow her plotline, and discovered that there are two versions of Juro in different ages and times. Surprising as it was for me, I was more surprised to find out it’s a normal revelation in Juro’s own story.

The issue there isn’t actually about there being another version of him, but more about his illusory friend and entire live-in-a-simulation dilemma. In one story, like Megumi’s, Juro is deeply loved, while in another story, like Tsukasa Okino’s, Juro is a wanted criminal. The mystery is born from your ignorance and is constantly changing depending on your progression. And of course, all these details play a part within the overall framework of the game.

I’ve never come across a game or movie as large-scale and multifaceted as 13 Sentinels, but also as intricate and well done. Even if you consider Christopher Nolan’s movies long and complicated, they can’t compare to this game’s 40 hours of mindbending complexity and intrigue. The best part is that you can choose the character or the twists that you like most, depending on each scenario, or depending on which sci-fi movie you liked in your childhood.

There’s no clapping scene at the end like in Evangelion, and I thought that was a missed opportunity for all the anime vibes, but at least the “get in the mecha, Shinji!” feeling is all over the place, so if you were a fan of that (as well as of Christopher Nolan), then 13 Sentinels should be the complete experience for you.

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